Guildford is hardly your standard cathedral – it looks so like a cinema that one almost expects the organ to come up through a hole in the floor. We (the Erleigh Cantors) were made welcome on a return visit there at the end of July, at a time when many other churches would have been inaccessible. As it was, we seemed to have more than the usual number of psalms and hymns with references to floods in.
I won’t list all the music but there were a couple of new pieces for me – for example, Verdi’s Pater Noster, actually a setting of an expanded paraphrase in Italian by Dante. Another anthem which I’d never sung was Angels by Tavener, which reminded me of various pieces by Britten, such as his Antiphon and Rejoice in the Lamb.
Some other music I hadn’t sung for a while, such as Willan’s huge anthem Gloria Deo per immensa sæcula, and that mysterious absentee from the Priory Records set of Mags/Nuncs, William Matthias’ ‘Jesus College’ evening canticles. I like these apart from the Rutteroid ‘aaahs’ in the Nunc.
In the course of my two visits to sing at Guildford Cathedral I’ve now heard no fewer than six sermons on the subject of Mary Magdalene.
How empty my blog looks as I write this! The right-hand menu extends far below the entries on the left. I hope to put up several more posts between now and the end of August.
Quality not quantity!